Obituary: Sanora Babb

* Sanora Babb, novelist. Died age 98.

Sanora Babb, whose novel about the struggles of Dust Bowl migrants in California was published to critical acclaim 65 years after being shelved because it had the same theme as John Steinbeck's 1939 best-seller The Grapes of Wrath, has died. She was 98.

Babb was working for a federal agency that helped farmers during the Depression when she began writing Whose Names Are Unknown. The book was declared "exceptionally fine" by Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf, who planned to publish it.

Then Steinbeck's work on the same theme began dominating the best-seller lists.

The University of Oklahoma Press published the book in 2004. Calling it a "long-forgotten masterpiece" and "an American classic both literary and historical," many reviewers said it rivalled Steinbeck's novel.

She didn't publish her first novel, The Lost Traveler, until 1958 and other books followed.